All those things are requirements and I am sure there will be a growing requirement for all those things. In respect of wastewater in Shannon Vale, I am not sure why Cork County Council did not apply for funding but I will make inquiries in that regard. Those funds are in place precisely to solve the kinds of problems Deputy O'Sullivan articulated so well. There may be good reasons the council did not apply, so I do not want to jump to any conclusions, but we will certainly make inquiries with it.

I join the Leas-Cheann Comhairle in offering a céad míle fáilte, or a hundred thousand welcomes, to our guests from South Africa on behalf of the Government. I have had the privilege to visit their country just once, when I was a board member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and had a chance to visit Pretoria, Johannesburg and Pilanesberg, but I have never been to the Cape, Natal or other parts of South Africa. I am really looking forward to another visit there sometime in the future, and would very much welcome th…

Tógfaidh mé ceisteanna ó Uimh. 20 go dtí Uimh. 26 le céile. The all-island women's forum, established by the National Women's Council of Ireland in 2021, is a very welcome contribution to the shared island initiative. The forum aims to respond to the under-representation of women and further develop women's role in peacebuilding and civic society. Its work has been funded by the reconciliation fund of the Department of Foreign Affairs. President Michael D. Higgins spoke at a conference of the forum in Enniskillen i…

I thank the Deputies. I start by joining with Deputy Conway-Walsh in her remarks commending the work of Noeline Blackwell who is retiring shortly from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. She is somebody I have worked with in various different formats. She is a very pleasant person but is also somebody who has really made a big difference for the better in Irish life. I congratulate her on her retirement. She is, as Deputy Conway-Walsh said, a true human rights advocate, and I hope she will be open to a future role with …

-----we would be asking for help from others and the homeless figures would be much greater.

I will have to get back to the Deputy on that.

I thank the Deputy for raising this very important question. I acknowledge that we have a real and serious problem of rising homelessness in Ireland. More than 12,000 people today are in State-provided emergency accommodation. Emergency accommodation is available for almost everyone who needs it but emergency accommodation is not the solution. We seek to avoid people having to use emergency accommodation in the first place. If they have to, we seek to get them out of emergency accommodation into a secure tenancy as…

The Deputy asked what we are doing now and what we are doing today. First, we are providing additional funding for local authorities and NGOs this year to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. Second, additional emergency accommodation is being provided so there is emergency accommodation for almost everyone who needs it, if they do need it. Of course, emergency accommodation is not a solution; it is a stopgap. Some 1,500 extra social homes are being leased this year, ahead of what was planned. …

I am somebody who believes in home ownership. I believe no form of housing security is better than home ownership. Not only does home ownership give people the security of owning their own home, it means they do not have to pay rent when they retire. It also gives them financial freedom such as the option of borrowing against the value of the home to return to education. It gives them so many options that they just do not have if they do not own their own home. Yes, I acknowledge that home ownership has fallen in t…

We will consider them and she will see our response to the motion when the debate occurs. The Deputy can list statistics and that is fair enough. There are other statistics that I could mention. House prices have been falling for several months. They have fallen for nearly six months in a row in Dublin. They have peaked and they are falling. The number of people buying their first home is almost 400 a week now. This is the highest since the Celtic tiger era. The Deputy cannot deny that reality. It is a fact. What a…

As I indicated to Deputy McDonald, we have had two temporary eviction bans in Ireland. One was introduced by the previous Government, which I led during the pandemic, and the other was introduced by this Government last year. What did we learn from those two eviction bans? At best, they reduce the number of people who are homeless in the short term. The most recent eviction ban did not even do that. Homelessness and the number of people in emergency accommodation continued to rise almost every month that the second…

The truth is any time a temporary measure is introduced, there comes a point where that measure has to end. There is then a snapback, bounce-back or an effect where numbers rise. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, made it very clear, on the week he proposed we have a temporary eviction ban, that there would be an uptick once it was lifted. That is inevitable and is one of the problems, of course. We had a short-term ban, which did not reduce the numbers in emergency acc…

As the Deputy is aware, there are many different ways of measuring inequality but the measure that is most commonly used is the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality. That shows that Ireland is one of the more equal countries in the European Union and the OECD. While it is not the case every year, it does show that over the period of the last five to seven years, inequality in Ireland has narrowed, whereas in other countries it has widened. On other measures you mention such as, for example, lif…

I accept that the country has a lot of problems and we have a lot of work still to do as a Government, and there will always be work to do, no matter who is in government, but I do not accept the Deputy's premise that we are doing so badly. This is a country that has full employment. It is a country that has among the highest life expectancies, if not the highest, in the European Union. It is a country that has among the best educational outcomes, with more people going on to further and higher education than ever …

The Deputies opposite have all raised important issues - four very important issues. I have no difficulty in having them debated. We have Government time and Opposition time in the House but the Government is using its time this week to enact important legislation. The Opposition chose its issues but it did not choose any of the issues just raised for debate this week. Therefore, if the Deputies feel-----

The Deputies are obviously free to use time next week, when they will have more Opposition time. They can use their Opposition time from this week, or we can try to schedule some debates through the Business Committee-----

----but we have a legislative programme and need to get it done.

The week after, so.

We will certainly consider any legislation that the Labour Party puts forward, but I would have to understand how that would work. We also have an issue of older people - senior citizens - becoming homeless. Would the Labour Party's Bill have the effect of putting them at the bottom of the list? That would be a problem. What we need is enough social housing for everyone.

To be very clear, section 64 of the Education (Admission to Schools) Act 2018 explicitly prohibits the charging of admission and enrolment fees for admission or for continued enrolment in a school. Whatever may be said to parents, they do not have to pay them, and they are voluntary contributions, but I appreciate that many parents do not feel that way and feel under pressure to pay them. We have increased the capitation grant by 7.5%. I have no doubt the Minister, Deputy Foley, will seek a further increase for nex…